The Declassification Engine

Matthew Connolly has been working with big data and machine learning to better understand what the government is hiding from its citizens. In his new book, he argues that having so many classified documents makes it harder for the government to protect truly sensitive information. He says presidents really do have awesome power, even sovereign control over secrecy. And in fact, there are only a couple of thousand people who are allowed to decide whether this or that technology or program should be classified as top secret or confidential.